After careful examination, I've determined that leftism and liberalism are fundamentally the same thing. These labels are distinguished by borderline meaningless word-games. If you go back and read authors from before the 19th century, there isn't even a distinction to be made. They all called themselves liberal. It seems the changing point primarily lies with Engels and Marx who seem to have coined the word game for use within a (and I don't use this word trivially) pseudo-science, which itself was just a lashing out against their contemporaries. The foundations of our political terminology are based in some Dianetics-tier sophistry, basically no more respectable than Lacan's Algebra.Anybody else realize this? These aren't distinctions based on concrete, measurable things. It's not about cohesive differences in ideologies. This crap is all just window dressing for personal grievances between people, all stacked up on top of each other and much of it completely lost to time. How can anybody take political and economic theory when it all boils down to this?
Same thing with Fascism and Conservatism
>>18053692Conservatives are a brand of liberals, absolutely.Fascism I'm on the fence about. It posits itself as different from the rest (Mussolini was a Liberal/Leftist who was outed from the Italian Socialist community for his war-hungry outlook, and sought a "Third Position" thereafter) but I'm not sure how much that holds. It still seems particularly influenced by enlightenment ideas, especially romanticism.On the other hand, unlike the liberalism umbrella, it's hard to find Fascist theory that underlines the importance and inherent dignity of the individual. Some branches posit an inherent social hierarchy which is fixed from birth, but they base it within things like racial science which itself is a product of the enlightenment. Ultimately I think it still might qualify as liberalism because there is no fascism that exists from outside the perspective ingrained into us by the enlightenment. The mental framework isn't radically different in a meaningful capacity. Hence why you get fascist blends with various 'forms' of liberalism. Mussolini's Italy was based upon Mercantilism. Bolshevism was undoubtedly Fascist while also being derived from Leninism.One things for certain, the adversarial founding principle of all third position ideologies entail that they too are nothing but an encoding of personal spats that we aren't privy to, just like the rest. Endless word-games.
>>18053717>It still seems particularly influenced by enlightenment ideas, especially romanticism.I thought romanticism and the enlightenment were at odds with each other. Enlightenment = reason, science, progress. The world is fundamentally rational and human can master nature. Romanticism was a reaction to that and placed a premium of emotions/feelings, heroism, creativity, nature=good, while also tending towards a nostalgia for the old and traditional.Leftism and liberalism have the same roots in the Enlightenment. I think fascism was very much bound up in that reaction to the Enlightenment. The Bolsheviks meanwhile really put themselves forward as "scientific" and imagined themselves as building a scientific future society. Stalin would be characterized as a great "social scientist" and you can socially engineer an entire country. The official ideology was held to be "scientific." This seems very strange today but this is like 1920s, 1930s. It was kind of like Atomic Heart which shows a utopian version of it, but the game was made by a Russian which might be why he got the vibe a bit better:https://youtu.be/RdsKoWUNcIkThe right-wingers back then often wrote about horror at the modern world, like it's all going to turn people into numbers. Like "living in the pods and eating the bugs." But fascism also took the form of a revolt, and Mussolini had been a socialist. But in general the right believes there's "more to life" and more likely to entertain a mystical or religious dimension, or at least seeking to be transfixed by the beauty of something. That can also include war. It can be beautiful or awe-inspiring in some kind of way.
But I don't know how much that still holds. When I look around at politics, there doesn't seem to be much rationality or any plan. Let alone one constructed along scientific methods. There's a lot of "trad" nostalgia on the right, but then a lot of far-leftists seem pretty irrational as well and running primarily on feels. It also makes me wonder how much of "communism" that's out there is essentially a reactionary phenomenon at this point because it's based on nostalgia for a lost civilization, but very few of the people involved have any real knowledge of it. (I'm not saying it was good.)But in terms of the "belief in science" stuff, what is there? It's like Pen and Teller? They're liberals and I suppose that's where it still exists.
All this is the fault of Marx and Engels, who recast politics as a historical-materialist struggle between classes, essentially framing liberalism as a bourgeois ideology to be critiqued.
>>18053688yeah nope
Liberals are leftists, in the French Revolution sense.
>>18053778>But in terms of the "belief in science" stuff, what is there? It's like Pen and Teller? They're liberals and I suppose that's where it still exists.Who doesn't believe in science? People not intelligent enough to understand it. If any scientist says something is true and it is not, then the scientific process used to reach that claim is flawed.That show seemed pretty spot on most of the time.>>18054028Prager is a tool. He can say he's a liberal who doesn't see race but he's a jew who favors Judaism. Leftists marxists attack class but will never admit to having distinctions on race. Even if they do.You can have a government that doesn't discriminate by race or religion but if you still culturally have these differences they lead to division in said government depending on the individual circumstance.There are differences in far left grievance culture and liberalism. Race blindness benefits minorities. Leftist grievance culture takes advantage of racial differences to destabilize.There are convenient lies used by all sides of politics.If you look at the politics of America rationally. Its easy to see that after the revolution if you were planning for strength you would have to take different nationalities and blend them together to form a common national bond. Because there weren't going to be enough people from England to achieve this.Liberalism suits this need perfectly.If you take for example pre Communist Russia. It was perhaps the most multicultural nation in the entire world. It had vast differences in race as well. You could even say it was more liberal before Communism. Which hammered out multiculturalism everywhere it went. But still, there was sort of a common strain between liberalism and communism. Thier hatred for monarchy and aristocracy. For a centralized religious authority. Its extremely difficult to pair reality to abstract political philosophy exactly.
>>18053756>I thought romanticism and the enlightenment were at odds with each other.I think it's complicated. Romanticism was a reaction to the rationalist parts of the enlightenment, but the hyperrationalists themselves served as but a single cloister of the enlightenment. Even Hume never dismissed the supernatural, his core philosophy was of a universal skepticism, never outright rejection. Romanticism's individualism is distinctly liberal with its inclusion of "Rising above one's station" into old tales that pretty much never even paid such things mind. In the medieval era, it would be going against god's natural order. In the classical era, it would be hubris. But Romanticism can't escape it's newfound drug: the common man has inherent worth in that he may simply be Latently Noble, or some such crap.
